


Fledgeling of Jerusalem

by AlamutJones



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Gen Fic, Jerusalem, Masyaf
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-15
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-18 16:57:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/563306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlamutJones/pseuds/AlamutJones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some assassins are born into the Order. Some are not born, and must be made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've tried to be as historically accurate as I can within the bounds of the Assassin's Creed universe canon. If you find any mistakes or inconsistencies in my grammar, my spelling, my understanding of canon or other historical detail, please let me know :)
> 
> The Assassin's Creed games, characters and certain aspects of real world locations are all property of Ubisoft. I'm not making any money off this, and I mean no disrespect.

It had taken barely a minute for Amir to wonder if he’d done something wrong. Standing in the entrance to the cartographer’s workshop, scuffing one bare foot in the dust, shoving unruly curls out of his eyes to keep from tripping over and making a fool of himself…he’d hardly opened his mouth, and already it had turned sour.

 

“Tell me your name, boy.”

 

 

“Amir ibn Kadar, master.”

 

 

Those two sentences had been enough. His new master had stared at him, seeming hardly to see him, and his mouth had fallen into a thin line. Thick, dark brows had drawn together like a storm cloud yet to break. His right hand had clenched reflexively into a fist by his side, it seemed without him noticing. He had no left arm, only a stump cut off below the shoulder with the empty sleeve of his black _djellaba_ neatly folded and pinned in place to cover it, but even that shoulder had tensed.

 

Oh dear. What would his father have said? How would Father have fixed this?

 

With a smile, perhaps a joke. Yes, that was what Father would have done. Amir didn't remember Father very well, but in the dim memories he had Father was always laughing. Surely he would have had the right words to make anger melt away; watching him in the middle of an argument was like a gap between clouds in the midst of a storm, casual and cheerful and deflecting every barb as though there was no way it would ever come close. Even Mother hadn’t been able to be angry at him for long, and she was the one who always saw his food get cold when he came late. According to Mother, he’d looked faintly ridiculous wearing a sword.

 

Father had been with Saladin. Well, not _with_ Saladin – only the great commanders and princes ever really spent any time with the man; a common footsoldier like Father had been would probably hardly know what Saladin looked like – but still. In his army. Fighting the knights, the crusaders who’d come all the way across the sea to tear Jerusalem apart stone by stone and stain their horses to the shoulder with blood. Amir knew the stories. No one alive now could actually _remember_ the crusaders first capturing the city, of course not, but the stories were alive and well, and they certainly remembered the crusaders losing the city again.

 

That was four years ago. That was when Father had died, in the siege to take the city back from the Christians. Amir barely remembered living in the military camp, following Saladin’s army on the march; in his head there was dust, the smell of woodsmoke and old shit rising from the camp every night, soft sounds of sweat-lathered harness jingling in the sun when the column moved out every morning…but nothing concrete. Nothing real. All he _truly_ knew was here, Jerusalem, the little house with his mother and sister inside. He was the man of the family now, since Father wasn’t here. It was his duty to see that they were all right, that they had food to eat and clothes to wear…

 

…and lucky him, he’d just upset his new master, who jerked his head towards the back alcove of a workshop crowded with parchment, ink, an **_awful lot_** of long white feathers ready to be cut into quills.

 

“You'll sleep at the back, and eat with me. Hurry up. We have a lot to do.”

 

“Yes sir.”

 

And that was how it had begun. That was how he met Malik.

 

*****

 

Malik wouldn’t say how he had lost his arm. It couldn’t have been so long ago; he seemed hardly to remember that he _had_ lost it, and when he did it seemed to pull him up short. Crossing the workshop in two or three long strides, he was never still for long enough to find himself off balance. Or sitting with his legs crossed and a half-finished map on the workbench before him, he’d curse softly when the nib of his pen snapped or split, searching the bench for a penknife to mend it and then let out an irritable, half-stifled little sigh, calling Amir in as though it was the last way in the world he’d ever wanted to waste his precious time.

 

Amir couldn't blame him for being annoyed. You needed two hands to cut a new pen to shape, or at least a second forearm to hold the wooden cutting block still. Malik kept a supply of fresh ones already cut, but even he sometimes ran out.

 

Other than that, there was parchment to scrape and stretch over great frames; thick rolls of calfskin or smaller, finer kid-skins that became softer than butter under his hands. There was ink to make; iron filings and the galls of thorn trees made black, copper made green, sometimes he crushed up tiny insects (he didn’t know what they were, he’d never seen them anywhere else) or lead to make a deep red that stained his fingers. The worst one was yellow, by a long way; he liked cows, he had nothing against cows, but all the same, they _stank!_

 

There were messages to run. Deliveries to make. Sometimes when he returned from those, Malik would pull a charred brand from the brazier and make him sketch his route in charcoal on the paving stones.

 

“Show me…ach, not like that,” and Malik would twist his ear roughly between thumb and forefinger to stop him in his tracks, “Show me where you _really_ went.”

 

These were strange maps. What sort of man wanted a map that marked broken windows, or ladders, or the corners out of the wind where the archers that roamed over rooftops liked to sit and rest their sore feet? What sort of a man would ever need to know exactly where all the rooftop gardens were, the tallest buildings, where merchants delivering fodder and clean bedding for the city’s stables parked their hay carts? Who exactly needed to know about crumbling stonework, the sort where a man – or a boy – could curl his toes and fingers inward and brace as he climbed?

 

Malik probably didn’t need this – how would a one armed man climb to the eagle’s nest on the golden mosque, in the rich quarter? How would he even know there was one? – but he wanted it. All of it. There were never too many details.

 

Malik timed it when Amir climbed to the roof to tend the pigeons, too. Amir was getting better at it, he was getting faster – he’d always been a good climber anyway, Mother said he was so small that whatever he was climbing didn’t notice him on it! – but still he sometimes got stuck, and for some reason there was no ladder. Every other pigeon loft he’d ever seen had a ladder, but not this one. Instead, Malik would sit in the courtyard, sketching the first faint lines on a new chart and calling out instructions without looking up

 

“Left…yes, there. You see the corner, where the bricks have broken? Use your eyes!”

 

Malik hadn’t told him what these exercises were for. Amir wondered, lying on his lumpy straw pallet at night, but never quite had the courage to ask. Besides, he had a pretty good idea of how the conversation would go already - Malik seemed to know everything, and God knew he watched Amir closely, but that didn't mean he was going to share. He'd probably give Amir's ear a sharp tweak and send him on his way none the wiser.

 

Still, maybe one day, he would tell?


	2. Chapter 2

It was hard to tell how Malik felt about this whole thing.

 

 

Yes, he was often sharp with Amir. Yes, it hurt when his fingers grabbed an ear and twisted, and he was as quick as a snake about it. Even so…the other apprentice boys he knew all said their masters were allowed to beat them, they all said that their masters kept a stick or a belt especially for them. Malik had never done that. Malik didn’t keep a belt, and he didn’t keep a stick. He had never so much as raised his voice.

 

It wasn’t only that, either. When Amir played at soldiers with the other boys in the street, Malik was surprisingly slow to call him; he would stand there, looking as though he wanted to cross the two arms he no longer had over his chest, tapping his foot impatiently in the dust but watching the endless thrust and parry with an appraising look. He seemed so intent, sometimes Amir wondered if he realised they were only playing with sticks.

 

Had he been a soldier before? Was that how he had lost his arm?

 

Malik could have been a soldier. An archer, perhaps. Something light, something fast in layers of cloth and leather. He wasn’t very big, he would never have been in the heavier ringmail and scaled armour of a mounted man or staggered behind a shield as a footsoldier, but he certainly saw enough to have been an archer or a scout. By now, Amir knew just how strong his hand was, snapping out too quickly to dodge and giving him a clout across the back of the head!

 

“Ach, be careful! Haste is the enemy of speed, boy. Do it properly this time.”

 

Malik didn’t pray, though. That was an odd thing.

 

All the soldiers he’d known back when Father was alive had stopped to pray when they could, but on Fridays Malik only made an indeterminate little noise somewhere inside his nose and shoved Amir out the door in the general direction of the mosque. If he prayed on those days – if he prayed at all - it was in private. Amir had never seen him.

 

If he wasn’t Muslim, he hadn’t been with Saladin. Was he a Jew, some old mercenary who’d been forced to hang up his sword? Was he a _Christian?_

 

No. No, he couldn’t have been a Christian. Amir had seen some dented old crusader armour that a travelling merchant had shown him once – a great round helm almost as big around as a barrel, covered in chipped red enamel - and there was no way that someone as thin and wiry as Malik could ever have even put it on. He wouldn’t have been able to take a single step in something so heavy, or see where he was going through those tiny slits where his eyes should be. No wonder Christians always seemed bothered, pink faced and sweating in the sun!

 

Not that he’d ever seen a Christian, mind you. Not a real one, not one of the crusaders who wore armour like the merchant from the caravan had shown him. At least, he didn’t think he’d ever met one. It was hard to tell. Even when he ran errands that took him past Saint Anne’s Church, or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (was that what it was called?), he was never entirely sure. People certainly _seemed_ to use them, and sometimes on Sunday mornings he heard singing and chanting from inside, but…

 

No. He didn’t think Malik could be a Christian. He didn’t know what Malik was. Perhaps it didn’t matter.


	3. Chapter 3

For a man who didn’t pray, Malik seemed to spend a lot of time talking with scholars.

 

Men in grey or white robes came in to see him several times a week, with their hoods drawn down to cast shade on their faces. Some were only young men. Some seemed quite old, older than Malik. None of them ever spoke to Amir. He wasn’t allowed to stay for the conversations either; no matter what he was doing, Malik would chivvy him out and he’d barely catch a word of it before the door closed behind him. He did know some of the visitors – even the older ones - called Malik _rafiq_ …

 

Rafiq? Was Malik a teacher then, not a soldier at all? What did he teach? Amir knew Malik could read and write – he wrote more letters than any one man should need – but teaching was another thing altogether. He had no idea what Malik might teach. And why were his students so…odd?

 

There _was_ something odd about the visitors. Amir couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Something about the way they moved seemed too…aware, if that was possible. Like cats. They were predatory. Even the older men were still fit and strong; the few inches of their calves that he could see under the robes were always sleek and muscled, they all still had bright eyes and straight backs. Some of them wore long steel swords on their left hip, and carried them resting loosely in a soft black leather sheath. Some had daggers or longer dirks tucked into the broad scarlet sash over their bellies.

 

Maybe it was just him, but Amir didn’t think walking around with a sword on your hip seemed very scholarly. And how would a scholar come to lose the ring finger on his left hand so completely, and yet to have the tiny stump where it ought to have been heal so well? So many of the visitors who came calling for Malik drummed their fingers idly on the benchtop as they waited, and so many of them had a bare little stump of smooth scarring where their fourth finger should have been…

 

If it was a coincidence, it was a very big one.

 

Malik never commented on it. Malik never said a word about any of it. Amir doubted very much that Malik ever would. That was why he was up here, curled up as small as he could make his body go in the patch of shade cast by the pigeon loft. He’d just cleaned out their straw and put fresh bedding down for them. They seemed to appreciate it, making soft _churr_ noises to each other and stretching to shake the dust from their wings. Late afternoon sun soaked through the shoulders of his tunic. Amir scratched the back of his neck and tried to think about something – anything – that wasn’t how much he needed to sneeze.

 

This time, he was going to hear it.

 

He knelt down closer, pressed his face into the aging wood. This wasn’t a very big knothole, but it would have to do.

 

The man who’d come today had a very plain sword. His robes were white, worn soft with long use, but there was no ornament anywhere on them. His red sash was narrow, the thinnest and least ornate any of Malik’s visitors had worn. Even so, he’d stalked in like a prince surveying his kingdom, and it had been difficult for Amir to meet those penetrating eyes. Instead, he’d stared at a thin scar that slashed the man’s lower lip, and then felt awkward and small when the man had caught him looking. Amir didn’t like him very much.

 

Malik didn’t seem to like him either. They were arguing.

 

“I will not run your errands!”

 

“Al Mualim has wished it so, **_Brother_** ,” Amir winced at that; Malik said “brother” the way another man might have said “maggot”, and leaned heavily on the counter to crowd into the stranger’s space. “Are you so arrogant, so self obsessed that you would disobey again?”

 

“No. Be silent.”

 

“The great Altair. Always thinking he knows best. Perhaps some time with a novice will teach you humility!”

 

“If you can tell me nothing of Talal…”

 

Malik made a dismissive gesture. He could have been swatting away a fly for all the effort he put into it. The new man…oh, he looked as though he wanted to choke someone!

 

“Go. Get out. You have a man to find, if you remember how.”

 

The stranger spun on his heel and left with his robes flapping behind him.


End file.
